I think Weird Al summed it up best:

We been spending most our lives
Living in an Amish Paradise
We're just plain and simple guys
Living in an Amish Paradise
There's no time for sin and vice
Living in an Amish Paradise
We don't fight, we all play nice
Living in an Amish Paradise

Our neighbors Suzi and Melissa threw this year's Monster Drag, and we decided to all go as the Amish. There were a lot of couple costumes. My friend Joe came as a member of Blue Man Group. His wife Kim was a witch, and the hostesses were Western and English riders, respectively. The Possessed Punch was wonderful, as were all the icky treats. We had live performances by our friends Amy Henderson (the Monkey) and May-Lily Lee (the Lady Bug). Hef and Bunny won Best Couple costume, and we were edged out of Best Group by Cruella and her pups. Frida Kahlo won Best Individual Costume.

We've decided to put in a few hours work each night towards the upstairs. Hopefully, this will allow us a bit more free time on the weekends. Here are some photos of the work we did last night, and of the rest of the upstairs. Apologies for the blurriness. They were taken this morning, before coffee.

You might have noticed all the thumbnails on this site. Maybe you haven't. In any case, I wanted something that would easily generate that nonchalant, scattered look, so I wrote a script in Python using PIL to do it. It worked well enough, but I wanted to be able to distribute it and let others play, so I wrapped it up in a tidy little app. I call it Thumbscrew, since it thumbnails and rotates.

You can set the maximum angle that any given thumbnail will be rotated (plus or minus), the maximum size of the thumbnail's bounding box (before rotation), and the border thickness. I've provided some handy default options, and the combo box lets you set the values arbitrarily.

I've passed it around to a few friends, and am already getting feedback and feature requests!

It's written in Python, using PyObjC for the GUI, and I'm distributing the source with the MIT license. If you don't want to use the GUI, you can also just use the included Thumbnailer.py module which is where the heavy lifting occurs, but you'll need PIL installed. To build the source, you'll need Bob Ippolito's py2app distutils extension.

Downloads: binary and source

A good designer friend suggested I reposition the gloss to make the light appear to come from straight overhead, and that making the shadow blue might be more realistic.

I also made the blues deeper to give a sense of mass and density.

You can download the new icon files (ZEM.icns and ZEMDocument.icns) and place them in ZopeEditManager.app/Contents/Resources/ to get the new look.

The bathroom's proceeding apace. This weekend I put down the shower pan liner, adhering it to the cement underneath. I was a bit enthusiastic about making the cut for the flap for the lip, and cut from the base of the pan liner, so I had to patch the liner in two places.

It will have cured by tonight, though, so we can perform a water test. The books and articles we read for guidance on this all say about the same thing:

When the pan liner is down, use a balloon stopper to prevent water
from escaping down the drain, mark the pan liner an inch or so
below the entrance lip, and fill the pan liner with water to that
mark. Come back in a day and if the water is to that line,
proceed. If the water line is lower, fix leaks and start over.

Er!? Sometimes, I desperately wish I could apply unit tests to my house projects.

In more positive (or less anxious?) news, we put down four more buckets of epoxy grout. Epoxy grout is great, but only has a working time of half-an-hour or so, which means you can only operate on a three square foot area or so at a time, but once it's down and cleaned, it comes out looking beautiful. We've still got another eight or nine buckets of grout to go through, but we've developed a pretty effective system for zipping through two or three at a time. We should be done with the tile in the main bathroom soon. Which leaves the entire shower area (see above) and the trim before we can get fixtures installed.

Outside the house, we should be getting the trim under the eaves put up this week, and then the painter can come and caulk up the siding seams and give us some color. It's the first time (probably) since the house was built in 1939 that there's been a layer of insulation in the walls. This means that despite adding approximately 800 square feet of living space, we should be paying about the same in heating costs as we did before.

Now that Bob's released py2app, I thought it might be time to get a new release of ZopeEditManager out. My local copy of the source code (now managed in an SVN repository) was built around the Xcode templates bundled with PyObjC 1.1, but I had a hankering to get back to good old-fashioned straight Python. Every time I built ZEM with Xcode, it forced so many additional frameworks and libraries along that in the end, the binary was so bloated I was afraid to release it. Now, using py2app, the binary's back down to 1.8MB, roughly the same size it was under bundlebuilder. Kudos to Bob for getting it out!

Another thing that was whispering in the back of my mind was the icon I originally made for ZEM. Recently, Brent Simmons blogged a link to new NetNewsWire icons. On his site, Wolfgang Bartelme wrote a tutorial demonstrating the use of Illustrator to make lickable, Aqua icons. Seemed simple enough (after a trip through Babelfish), and I decided to take the plunge and try it out. Here are the results:

I'd be more than happy to hear thoughts on the change.

It's been quite a while since I've made a release of ZEM (Zope.org shows that 0.9.4 was released back in May). While there have been more than a few feature requests that I'm looking forward to tackling, I was so pleased with the return of a pure Python build system, that I reworked the code a bit, cleaned up the source, threw a new icon on, and am releasing 0.9.5 (and source).

It's official. The human body uses a Mark and Sweep algorithm for garbage collection. From the Nobel Prize for Chemistry Press Release:

Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose have brought us to
realise that the cell functions as a highly-efficient checking
station where proteins are built up and broken down at a furious
rate. The degradation is not indiscriminate but takes place
through a process that is controlled in detail so that the
proteins to be broken down at any given moment are given a
molecular label, a 'kiss of death', to be dramatic. The labelled
proteins are then fed into the cells' "waste disposers", the so
called proteasomes, where they are chopped into small pieces and
destroyed.

The label consists of a molecule called ubiquitin. This fastens to
the protein to be destroyed, accompanies it to the proteasome
where it is recognised as the key in a lock, and signals that a
protein is on the way for disassembly. Shortly before the protein
is squeezed into the proteasome, its ubiquitin label is
disconnected for re-use.

I've decided to host the download for ZopeEditManager here on urbanape.

ZopeEditManager 0.9.4